Urban Social Listening: Potential and Pitfalls for Using Microblogging Data in Studying Cities

by Justin B. Hollander, Erin Graves, Henry Renski, Cara Foster-Karim, Andrew Wiley

Overview

This book analyses new software tools and social media data that can be used to explore the attitudes of people in urban places. It reports on the findings of several research projects that have have experimented with using microblogging data in conjunction with diverse quantitative and qualitative methods, including content analysis and advanced multivariate statistics.

Applied researchers, planners and policy makers have only recently begun to explore the potential of Big Data to help understand social attitudes and to potentially inform local policy and development decisions. This book provides an original analysis into how Twitter can be used to describe the urban experience and people's perception of place, as well as offering significant implications for public policy. It will be of great interest to researchers in human geography, social media, cultural studies and public policy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781349955398
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	06/08/2018
Edition description:	Softcover reprint of the original 1st ed. 2016
Pages:	97
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.27(h) x (d)

About the Author

Justin B. Hollander is Associate Professor of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning, Tufts
University, USA.

Erin Graves is Senior Policy Analyst at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, USA.

Henry Renski is Associate Professor, Department of Landscape Architecture and

Regional Planning, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA.

Cara Foster-Karim is a graduate of the Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning Program, Tufts University, USA.

Andrew Wiley is a graduate of the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning, Tufts University, USA.

Dibyendu Das is a graduate student in Electrical Engineering at Tufts University, USA.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Introduction.- Chapter 2. A Short History of Big Data Analysis.- Chapter 3. Taking Microblogging Data for a Test Drive.- Chapter 4. A Close Look at Urban Immigrant Communities.- Chapter 5. A National Comparison: Twitter vs. The American Housing Survey.- Chapter 6. Conclusion.

Editorial Reviews

This book presents the development of tools that can be used to analyse Twitter data for sentiment analysis, in order to mine the attitudes of people in urban places. … this book presents these issues in a clear and progressive manner. Therefore, I would recommend it for researchers looking to gain an understanding of the fundamental concepts of utilizing Twitter data for sentiment-analysis purposes.” (Alyson Lloyd, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 42 (3), May, 2018)

“This work is grounded in computational linguistics and data mining. Urban Social Listening deals with a very important part of social media analysis, the analysis of sentiment expressed online. … I recommend this book to researchers who are new to the field and as a good introductory guide to conducting a comparative sentiment analysis of urban communities based on Twitter data.” (Andrei Kirilenko, Journal of Urban Affairs, Vol. 40 (8), 2018)

“Urban Social Listening: Potential and Pitfalls for Using Microblogging Data in Studying Cities reports on empirical research conducted in 2013 and 2015, it still reflects that early enthusiasm. … provides an understandable introduction to some basic methods of socialmedia analysis applied to cities and may serve to inspire the more complex research designs needed to fully utilize the exciting—yet challenging—social media data sources that are now emerging.” (Robert Goodspeed, Journal of Urban Affairs, 2014)

From the Publisher